First-year owner finds that lawyers, watching the bottom line, and a dose of negativity all come with the territory.
If the NHRA is ever on Family Feud, and the owners are one one team and the drivers and crew on the other, I would be on the driver and crew side of things.
What’s unique about the way I grew up in the sport—coming up as a crew member who became a driver and then a team owner—is that even up to this point, when I leave the racetrack and go somewhere, go out at night, most of my friends that I hang out with are crew chiefs and crew members, and not other drivers.
Yeah, I am friends with and I do stuff with other drivers, but honestly, I would say 90% of the people I hang out with away from the racetrack on a race week are crew chiefs and crew members. And even now, as an owner, I don’t hang out with the other owners.
My crew guys joke. They call me “Boss Man” sometimes. Little things like that to crack me up, because they know I don’t view myself that way.
I’ve got too many people around me who would probably slap me if I ever got out of whack or didn’t stay grounded. There’s the weekly phone calls from one of my old bosses, Don Prudhomme, who is always checking on me, offering any advice on the business side, on the ownership side. He knows I’m still racing, still driving. He helps me on how to keep the driver and owner roles separated.
I am an owner, yes, but I still have the same people around me. Still, so much is different. When I get to my hotel room on a race weekend, the first thing I do is go down my list, look at my emails and go over the business side of things. I never had to do that before.
Be Sure to Lawyer Up
Probably one of the most important things I did in the offseason was to hire a good attorney. Not just for legal issues, but I mean for contracts and the way that you view things—stipulations that fans may not understand that are in contracts with performance clauses and things like that. Those are things you never think about as a driver.
Antron Brown is also a new owner/driver, and he connected me with Edd Harney out of Indianapolis. Edd is a racer at heart, and he’s a great attorney. He’s got kids in junior dragsters, and that’s how the association started with Antron.
Yes, I look at things quite a bit differently these days, and a lot of that is because of having good legal counsel. All through the offseason, every contract, everything we signed in the offseason, Edd would help me through the process and say, “OK, this is Ron Capps, the team owner talking now.” And then he would say, “And now you need to talk to me like Ron Capps the driver and the racer.” He made me split up the way I view things to the point where I really had to separate myself when we discussed different things with the race team.
Edd might just be the MVP of the whole offseason.
Ron Capps, left, takes time out for a fan at a recent NHRA event.
Richard H Shute
The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow
One thing I’ve learned in talking to other owners, is that things can get pretty negative. With some owners, everything is the worst-case scenario. It seems like every time I’m talking to the people who are on the business side, the ownership side, it seems like there are always people who want to look at the worst-case scenario.
I know there’s a lot of things going on in the world right now that we’re having to navigate, as far as parts and pieces. With everything going on, being able to get a lot of the metals and a lot of the things we took for granted, we’re having to plan a little more. But that notwithstanding, it seems like every time I’m around a lot of these owners, some of them seem to think like the sky is falling all the time.
Sometimes, you’ve just got to get away from it. I don’t want to know what I can’t do, and I don’t want to know the worst-case scenario on a lot of things. But a lot of it, you have to.
You also have got to keep it in check. It can get so depressing if sometimes all you hear is “This is the worst we’ve ever seen” or “This is why you can’t do that.”
There’s always a lot in our sport that we’re having to address on the racing side—like the discussion about whether we’re going to have three qualifying runs or four qualifying runs at an event. That’s a big thing right now. They announce a race, and then somebody at the track has to announce whether its going to be four runs or three runs. The fans don’t always understand what’s going on behind the scenes leading up to that decision.
Well, there’s a group of owners that get together and talk about it with NHRA. Some of those meetings and some of those get-togethers can get so negative sometimes that you need to have a positive outlet. I’ll call Antron and we’ll chat, because we’re both sort of in the same boat. We understand what all the negatives are, but we also have people around us that will give us the positives and encourage us. They’ll tell us what we’ve got to be careful of, but at the same time, not to make it sound like the sky’s falling.
Sorry, No Book of Secrets
Fans have always wondered what does it really cost to do this or do that. What does it really cost to make one run in one of these nitro cars?
You hear all these different numbers throughout the years, and you’ve been told certain numbers. I’m learning a little more on that side of it, but on some level you don’t want to. As a driver—and I made the mistake at Phoenix—you can’t let that all that stuff get into our head as a driver. You can’t be clouded and then go out and have your best reaction time, drive the best you can drive, with all those thoughts going on in your head.
It’s also hard to keep out of your head what’s going on in the world, especially with Russia and the stuff that is imported, including the nitromethane that fuels our Top Fuel and Funny Cars. The price has gone up so much. The price of steel and so many things we do with these cars has just skyrocketed.
Much like gasoline for the normal consumer, we’re seeing pricing going way up behind the scenes. The tricky part is having to balance the rising cost of our NHRA show while not wanting to charge our fans more. On the business side—I’ve learned this—is that costs have to be transferred. You go to the restaurant or go to buy gasoline or whatever it might be, and the rising costs that the businesses pay have to trickle down to the consumer. We’re trying to walk that tightrope at the NHRA.
Things are costing more, but we don’t want our fans to have to pay more. For example, we’ve traditionally had four qualifying runs at an event—two runs on Friday and two on Saturday. Coming out of the pandemic, however, we went to one qualifying run on Friday and two on Saturday. That was really to save the teams money so we didn’t have to charge the fans more money. I didn’t realize that then, because then I was just a driver. I wasn’t privy to a lot of the business side of things. That’s one main things that I’ve learned right off the bat.
We just announced our race weekend at Norwalk, Ohio, will have four qualifying runs. Yes, our four-wide at Charlotte will have four runs because you have four lanes and you need a qualifying run in each lane. But of the rest of the stops, the only race I’ve seen on the horizon where they’ve announced four qualifying runs is Norwalk.
Hopefully, the fans understand that the three qualifying runs is only for the benefit to not have to have our fans pay more to watch our NHRA drag races. That’s important to NHRA.
And to us team owners.
Keyword: NHRA Team Owner/Driver Ron Capps: We Don't Want Our Fans to Have to Pay More